‘Saw IV’ squeezes all the blood out of the torture franchise

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NO HELP IS COMING: “Saw IV,” with Betsy Russell (as Jill) about to meet some unspeakable fate in this scene, offers up the usual lage helping of torture while skimping on character development and moral justification for the brutality.

He has but one facial expression – iguana. And there is just one note in his voice – obscene phone caller before the age of caller-ID. But they’ve served Tobin Bell well through the lucrative clockwork-killing machine known as the “Saw” franchise.

Not fair. It’s what the character calls for. Surely, Bell would rather be playing Lear than a reptilian mass murderer masquerading as judge, jury and executioner named Jigsaw. Then again …

We saw Jigsaw dead at the end of, what was it? “Saw III”? We watch his grisly, Anatomy 401-detailed autopsy (pointless) in the first seven minutes of “Saw IV.” But Jigsaw’s back, in flashbacks and in spirit, on those cheap-jack microcassette tapes, in this ghoulish marionette that he seems to have placed 744 copies of, in various killing rooms, over four “Saw” movies.

It’s called “torture porn,” this genre where we watch people strapped to this, nailed to that, faced with the ugliest choices you can imagine. “Bleed out” or cram your face through a wall of knife-blades to escape, stand on your tiptoes to avoid that noose breaking your neck as the block of ice melts beneath your feet. The twist to the “Saw” movies was that there has always been an alleged moral component. These victims “did this to themselves.”

Well, we’ve kind of gotten away from that by “Saw IV.”

What’s grown more amusing as the movies have “bled out” themselves, weaker and weaker in their excruciating, squirm-inducing scenes set on the knife-edge of dilemma, is seeing how each succeeding screenwriter or team of writers has struggled to bring the dead back to life. Dead characters, dead gimmicks, resuscitated from film to film. It’s like a soap opera where folks fall down mineshafts or are “lost at sea,” only to return as different, cheaper actors.

Speaking of cheaper actors, what are Donnie Wahlberg and Angus Macfadyen doing in this trash? They’re back from “Saw II” and “III” respectively. Surely the kids’ college funds are flush by now.

Jigsaw is indeed dead. But through flashbacks and a headache inducing string of plot twists involving characters from this movie or an earlier one, we have his family history explained, his motivations explained, his degree of guilt explained.

Cops go missing and there’s a ticking clock, 90 minutes to save them. Elaborate tortures are devised for characters we know so little about that the tortures don’t quite fit their “crimes,” something we were taught to expect in the original “Saw.”

It’s exposition-exposition-exposition-DEATH-exposition-exposition-ANOTHER DEATH, all in dark, dank rooms where “See what I see” and “Feel what I feel” and “Cherish your life” are scrawled on the walls.

Could director Darren Lynn Bousman, trapped in these movies since the second one, be the one letting all these clue-snippets of dialogue through?

“It’s time to let go.”

“This is overkill.”

“Did you ever think you’d wind up here?”

“Why the h— do we still do it?”

It’s somewhat better put together than “Saw II” or “III,” though there isn’t a scare in it. Well, save for a line of dialogue that will chill any horror fan to the bone: